Towelhead

[September 24th, 2008]

Alan Ball, upon whom some mischievous muse bestowed a Janus-faced capacity for both the ersatz ipecac of American Beauty (which he wrote) and the heartaching perfection of Six Feet Under (which he created), just wants to make you cry, and for this he is necessary now more than ever. Towelhead, written and directed by Ball, might intermittently give in to didactic tics—check out that title—but in the end it’s an affecting antidote to the strain of wink-wink gimcrackery infecting too much of contemporary cinema.

Based on Alicia Erian’s novel of the same name, Towelhead aligns flush with Ball’s universe of stressed and repressed suburbanites, outcast youth and confused desires. It’s 1991, Desert Storm is on the front pages, there’s such a thing as “Edie Brickell,” and Jasira (Summer Bishil, in a flooring feature debut) gets shipped down to Houston to live with her dad, Rifat (Peter Macdissi), the Lebanese half of her parentage. Rifat is a hypocritical traditionalist, and the last thing he wants is for Jasira to become the kind of made-up tart he likes to fuck. But she’s 13, and furtive forays into sexual satisfaction are pretty much the only things that exist when you’re 13. Her neighbor Travis (Aaron Eckhart) seems a little too curious about her curiosity, while her other neighbor Melina (Toni Collette, fantastic as always) is justifiably if overbearingly protective. Her predicament is a not very exaggerated version of the hell of teenage girlhood: Everyone but Jasira wants to decide who and how and what she should be.

Filmed from angles that appear to have been selected by lottery, Towelhead does not look like a movie you’d expect anything from, and the first 15 minutes come dangerously close to an American Beauty-style spiral into pandering pap, but it quickly coheres around Ball’s commitment to character and catharsis. Any aesthetic failures slip into far corners of awareness—what Ball is going for here is direct, sincere emotional resonance, and he achieves it using the most intransigent material imaginable: finely wrought, deeply troubled human beings. It’s melodrama in the Almodóvar mode: Discomfiting perversity collides with straight-faced sentimentality, so the sex is real and the feelings are dirty, like life but a bit tidier. Ball’s achievement might not be flashy, but it’s vital. He is keeping alive the only movie trick that doesn’t get old: feelings, nothing more than feelings. R.